Cent: Love during a time of Covid or what I did during the pandemic

If you’re reading this, you know who I am, and what I and my family can do that most people cannot.

My dad was the first, nearly thirty years ago, trapped in a room with a raging alcoholic, about to be beaten yet again, when, suddenly, he wasn’t in that room. He was several blocks away in the town’s public library, his usual refuge from an abusive father, but not previously reached by teleporting. He called it jumping.

Mom was next. Ten years into their marriage she’d been transported by Dad to the Eyrie, their cliff house, shortly before he was captured and imprisoned for several weeks. The cliff house is too hundred feet above the canyon floor and, when Dad didn’t return, she had to use the stored climbing equipment to descend. Unfortunately, the anchor bolt, set several years before, gave way while she was still 185 feet in the air. After falling that first fifty feet or so, Mom found herself in the living room of their Stillwater condominium.

Then their was me, five years ago, sweet sixteen, not only never been kissed, but never been to school, snowboarding near our home in Canada when I triggered an avalanche. I ended up in the reading nook under my bed with several cubic feet of snow.

So, we teleport—we jump.

And it turns out, you can do a lot with that ability. For instance, I started my own space program. Which is how we were able to set Grandmother up in her own space station.

But we don’t do it like NASA, where they are up for weeks or months, and may go months between resupply missions. We rotate up daily, trying to keep at least one jumper on station at all times, and we transport food, oxygen, and our medical staff up to Kirsten Station regularly.

What we didn’t want to do was transport the virus up there, too.